Watching Making A Murderer Doesn’t Make You A Legal Expert

In My Humble Opinion: The documentary series Making A Murderer is a fine piece of entertainment, but please, let’s also remember that it’s a 10 hour series that covers events that span over 25 years. I watched Making A Murderer on Netflix, and like a lot of other people found it completely engrossing and finished all 10 episodes rather quickly. While I was watching it, sorry, binging on it, I caught myself saying things like, “Steven Avery really got screwed; He deserves a new trial; Those cops were out to get him from the get go,” but when I was done, I then asked myself, “Who am I to weigh in on this?” Like a good majority of the people who watched the series, I’m far from a legal expert, but that hasn’t stopped the masses from chiming in and voicing their strong opposition to Steven Avery’s and Brendan Dassey’s incarceration

The series stirred such controversy that a petition with over 125,000 signatures was sent to The White House demanding President Obama grant Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey a pardon. Really? Like I said, I enjoyed the series and it surely convinced me that there might have been some things that weren’t exactly above-board when it came to the investigation and legal proceedings, but to ask the President for a pardon…come on people. Even one of Steven Avery’s own defense lawyers Jerry Buting brought up the point that the murder trial of Teresa Halbach went on for six weeks but only accounts for about 2-2.5 hours of the 10 hour series. There are a number of questions you have to ask yourself while you’re watching the series. How much testimony did we miss? What evidence might have been presented that didn’t make it into the series? Why weren’t the individuals the documentary accused of evidence tampering or wrong doing ever questioned by the film makers in order to offer up their side of the story? Were they questioned and the interviews were then intentionally left out of the final cut? Making A Murderer argues that Steven Avery didn’t receive fair treatment because the authorities involved didn’t like him, made assumptions about his character, and took steps to ensure a guilty verdict by framing him and falsifying evidence. If that’s the case, then shouldn’t we also question the validity of the series itself and the accusations it makes? Like I said, I’m not legal expert this is just my humble opinion.